Bowden: All towns need a Warren Briggs

Captain America wanted to ride as a cavalryman, this son of Minnesota constitutional lawyer Charles W. Briggs, who had served with Gen. John "Blackjack" Pershing's horse soldiers on the Mexican border. A West Point graduate, he served on Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay's staff, flew into the hot front of the Cold War as a Berlin Airlift pilot, taught English at West Point and demonstrated its mastery as a witty essayist in his later life. He led Pensacolians inspiringly through the 1970s Bicentennial with the first generation of community goals-setting that brought blacks and women into leadership roles.

Ever modest, the St. Paul, Minn., native moved to Pensacola from a Century sawmill, championing a better Pensacola. Every town needs a Warren Marshall Briggs, ever with a warm smile, twinkling blue eyes, sandy hair. He brushed aside a litany of vital public service since the 1960s, contentedly bragging that he has a long career as Pensacola's Chief Weed Inspector. As mayor emeritus of South Palafox Street, Warren cultivated the Crape Myrtle Precincts with a gardener's loving hand.

Warren Briggs set off Pensacola's Crape Myrtle love affair in the last century, energizing civic groups to color public spaces with the native Asian shrubs. He put his own green thumb to work as the original Mr. Clean and Green before he etched the words into our language.

Now in summer, Briggs Blossoms parade a multicolored symphony, a steady roadside harvest enriching the dream of the former Pensacola mayor, Florida legislator, congressional candidate and Baptist Hospital Foundation guru. Until the end at age 89, Warren was still drumbeating to make the city the Crape Myrtle Capital of the World. Myrtles flowering in summer will be his memorial.

I tagged him Captain America in 1970s; he honed his self-deprecating humor in the hard-knock sawmilling pinewoods of north Escambia County. Having tasted it all - West Pointer, teacher, Air Force pilot, learning command from crusty General LeMay, who invented the Strategic Air Command, and shed his major's gold leaves to move to Century - Briggs became the big boss of Alger-Sullivan Lumber Company and then presided over its dismantling. After becoming a voluntary Pensacola activist in 1967, he could be seen pulling weeds from Pensacola sidewalks and cussing the daylights out of nasty litterbugs.

A gentle philosopher, blending twangs of Mark Twain and Will Rogers into his sometimes salty ruminations, Warren partnered with preservationist Clark Thompson and resurrected an old south Palafox warehouse next door to New World Landing, seeding new economic life.

Warren Marshall Briggs never lost his civic energy and vision, ever prodding us to be short on foolish rhetoric and long on building Pensacola.